“What’d you expect them to do?” Sammie asked.
“Move, for one thing. They’re sitting ducks here.”
“Hold it,” I said. “What about your theory five minutes ago? Where Antonov was out to blackmail Rarig for a quarter-century-old indiscretion?”
Willy waved that away like a fly. “Bullshit smoke screen. I wanted them to think I was an idiot-think local, act local. You know, get their guard down. If what I said really happened, all Rarig would have to do is play dumb and keep his mouth shut. We don’t have any proof. Why do you think they told us all that crap about Vienna if they didn’t think their past was about to eat ’em up? They’re sweatin’ something out, and Antonov was just the tip of it. Rarig may not have killed him, but I do think he dumped him to buy some time.”
He put the car into gear, swung it around, and drove out of the inn parking lot. “What we need to do is sit and wait-not keep flapping our gums.”
He drove the quarter mile to where the driveway met the road, pulled over and killed the engine. “Right?”
Sammie was sitting in the backseat. Her voice was carefully neutral in the dark night air. “It does look like they’re the only game we have.”
I looked straight ahead, across the deserted road at the black wall of trees opposite. I found myself slowly emerging from the emotional air pocket that had almost swallowed me. The situation hadn’t changed, but the company had. The two people we’d just left had learned to forecast the future using rumors, inference, and suspicion, while covering their own tracks sowing confusion and deceit. Theirs was a world of convenient realities, none necessarily based on the truth. Sammie and Willy, by contrast, inhabited a clear-sighted universe of cause and effect-they smelled a scent, and they followed it to the end.
Their simple lucidity was a welcome tonic.
“How’ve you two been working your surveillance so far?” I asked.
“Catch as catch can-no regular rotation,” Sammie answered. “When one of us can carve out a few hours unnoticed, we spell the other guy. I think the chief knows we’re up to something, by the way, but he’s choosing to ignore us, so we’ve got a fair amount of slack.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let me help. I have to keep checking in with the state police, but I can reach my answering machine through my cell phone and pretend I’m still at home. And sure as hell I have more free time than either of you. Who wants to pull first shift?”
“I will,” Willy said immediately. “Sammie was just on, and you’re in no shape to do anything. Go home, get some sleep. I’ll call you when I want out.”
He drove us to where Sammie had stashed her car and left us there.
Five minutes down the road, she asked, “Feeling better?”
I laughed and rubbed my eyes. “Who’d have thought Willy Kunkle could ever pull you out of the dumps?”
Sammie drove into the Meetinghouse Hill Cemetery, where Kunkle had picked me up, and killed the engine. “This okay?” she asked.
I’d been so lost in thought, I’d barely noticed we’d stopped. I looked up and glanced around. “Sure,” I said, but I didn’t get out of the car.
She didn’t press me, sitting quietly, waiting.
“Why do you think Antonov came to the inn?” I asked at last.
I saw her frown in the reflected moonlight. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it was like Willy said-he wanted to put the squeeze on Rarig.”
“All the way from Russia? Leaving behind the most lucrative black market in the world?”
“Then to kill him for some past grudge?”
“Okay. Why right now?”
Sammie remained silent.
“Try this on,” I said. “When J.P. and I first visited the inn, Rarig played the genial host. At one point, he pulled out a recent New York Times piece featuring the place. It was very flattering-a big spread-but he kept it in a drawer out of sight. In the entranceway there are plaques from one gourmet magazine or another and the usual promotional material, so why not a blurb from one of the biggest publications in the country?”
“It say anything incriminating?”
“I didn’t read it carefully, but I doubt it. He knew we were cops by then-local cops. Remember what Willy said? ‘Think local, act local.’ I think that’s key. The one thing about that article is that the photographer caught Rarig only once, in a mirror, looking like he couldn’t wait for them all to go away. You ever hear about the Windham Hill Inn before all this?”
“Sure-one of the fanciest around, along with the two in Newfane.”
“Ever seen a picture of Rarig?”
She hesitated before staring at me. “No. You saying Antonov saw the picture in Russia, and that’s why he came over?”
“The New York Times is known all over the world. Rarig’s not his real name, and I bet it wasn’t when he was operating overseas. After he pulled out of the business and came up here, as far as his old enemies are concerned, he fell off the end of the earth. And I’m not saying it was Antonov who saw the article. I think it was his boss.”
“Georgi Padzhev.”
“Right. I think Willy hit the nail on the head tonight without even realizing it. He thought Kidder and Rarig told us all about Vienna because it was on their minds. But they knew what they were doing-that’s why they were so chatty. They were seeing how we’d react. Why, I don’t know yet.”
“I also think Willy’s right about Rarig not killing Antonov but disposing of his body.”
“Why one and not the other?”
“To buy time. Maybe to slip back into the shadows. Here’s a guy who’s spent his whole life with assumed names, foreign languages, probably even disguises, for all I know. He finds a body from the old days on his lawn. If he calls the cops, the press’ll climb all over it, and we’ll be digging into his past. Out of the question. So he dumps it-he knows where and when to go-and he washes his hands of it. ’Course, as Willy pointed out, he goofed. But it was a good plan.”
“Just so he can go back to being an inn owner?” Sammie interrupted.
“People generally do things for a reason,” I explained. “Burn buildings for the insurance, rob banks for the money. If killing Antonov and leaving his body was a message to Rarig, then hiding that body deprives the sender of any feedback-it forces whoever killed Antonov to do something more-something Rarig is hoping he’ll see coming this time.”
“Except we did find the body,” Sammie pointed out.
“But nobody knows we linked it to Rarig, not officially.”
Sammie slumped her head forward and placed both her palms against her face. Her voice was muffled by her fingers. “So what, Joe? What’s it all mean?”
“What I think it means,” I said tentatively, “is that Antonov was sent out to serve one purpose and ended up serving another. Padzhev saw Rarig’s picture. Antonov flew over here to check him out. Somebody-maybe Snowden, maybe an old enemy of Rarig’s, maybe even an enemy of Padzhev’s-knocked him off and left his body as a calling card, which Rarig then tried to make disappear. Presumably, had he succeeded, Rarig was hoping things would end there-Padzhev might even think Antonov never got to Vermont. But the cat’s out of the bag, so now we’re all in for something more-what, I don’t know. And I’m not sure Rarig does, either.”
Sammie was staring out the window before her. “So, he actually doesn’t know who killed Antonov, even though he fingered Snowden?”
“I think that’s right.”
“But Rarig remains a lightning rod of some kind, like Willy said, and for some specific reason.”
“Right again.”
“And Kidder’s his inside contact.”
“That’s my bet.”
“But if Snowden didn’t kill Antonov, why did he try to kill you?”
I didn’t answer at first. So many pieces of this puzzle were interconnected, seemingly on a three-dimensional frame, that I was finding it impossible to nail any one of them in place. “Maybe he didn’t,” I admitted.